Blame Kevan Miller if you want. You can, it's fair — the boo-boo was the first mistake of the game, granting the Canadiens the very early lead in a series where the first goal has mattered.

Torey Krug was forced by the Montreal forecheck to send the puck behind the net to Miller. Like a pinball it bounced off Miller's stick in front of the net, onto Lars Eller's and then into the back of the net. It was kerosene on an already electric Bell Centre, and Carey Price didn't allow anything for another playoff shutout of the Bruins, so it was decided early. Habs 4, Bruins 0. Game 7, Wednesday night at TD Garden.

But this one wasn't on Miller. A Game 6, on the road, with a chance to send your biggest rival home for the summer is a stage for the big boys, not 26-year-old undrafted rookies. And Miller's gaffe was hardly doomsday for the Bruins. It was down 1-0.

No, this one came down to that championship core the Bruins like to brag about, a group that couldn't convert at the right times, or at all, Monday night. It was Milan Lucic failing to get a shot off in the first minute of the game, a score that could have changed al the dominoes that followed. It was Krejci doing a drop pass to the middle for Torey Krug when everyone in the Bell Centre could tell Krejci was going to pass.

Most notably, it was Lucic again. The Bruins had pushed the Habs off, held the puck in the zone. They'd locked Brian Gionta and Lars Eller in the defensive zone for over two minutes. There was a five-minute stretch where they controlled the play. It was shift after shift, one line to the next. This is what the Bruins want to do, pound and grind and whittle away the opposition until, finally, they broke through.

And the opening was there. A loose puck skittered past Loui Eriksson to Lucic at the weak-side post. In the words of Chubbs Peterson, all he had to do was tap it in. He shot wide right. Lucic said after the game he converts that nine out of 10 times, which only makes the Bruins' pain 90 percent worse.

The Bruins never came close to tying it again. That was ensured when Zdeno Chara, who played an oddly ineffective game, and Tuukka Rask combined to let Max Pacioretty push the Habs to a Game 7. You know that feeling at an intersection, when one car starts to turn, then stops to let the other car go, then starts to go again, and finally has to back up to let traffic through? Chara and Rask did their own version Monday night, with Pacioretty hitting the red light.

Add in Loui Eriksson hitting a crossbar (the Bruins' 10th of the series), and the Bruins could count on two hands the number of chances they blew in just this game.

“It doesn't matter what it is. You've got to find a way to finish; it's as simple as that,” coach Claude Julien said in his postgame press conference. “Whether it's a little bit of puck luck, whether it's us not burying our chances and having to bear down, it doesn't matter. At the end of the day, you've got to find a way.”

And in this series, too many of their best players haven't found a way. Krejci talked Monday morning about owing it to his teammates to come up big, then was scoreless for the fourth straight game. Patrice Bergeron has no points in the last three games, and Iginla hasn't scored at even-strength all series.

Other than ones produced by the Carl Soderberg third line, the Bruins don't have an even-strength goal since Game 3. One line pulling the chain, the others off for lunch.

These are now desperate times for the Bruins. They’re at the edge of the cliff Wednesday night, a place they’ve often excelled at walking — they’ve won three of their last four Game 7s, including a dramatic victory over Montreal in 2011 that spurred the way to the Stanley Cup.

But these quiet nights from their best players are concerning. Is it enough to make Julien change his lines, something he’s very rarely done in a season that’s been wildly successful to this point? If he chooses to explore that option, there are limits. Carl Soderberg and Eriksson have been so good together that they can’t be broken up. Perhaps the wingers on the top two lines could be flipped, Lucic and Brad Marchand or Iginla and Reilly Smith.

But that seems doubtful. Julien is a coach who sticks with the horses that got him there. In recent years, the only major line change he’s made in the playoffs was last season, Tyler Seguin for Jaromir Jagr, which had as much to do with Seguin going wild child in Toronto as anything on the ice.

So the Bruins are here, for Game 7 with the Habs, all the marbles on the line and a season that had championship written all over it potentially ending far too early as the sound of crossbar and post shots rings in the air. Or perhaps Lucic will have a hat trick on three Krejci assists and the Bruins will party at the Garden.

It’s Game 7. The Bruins know better than most that anything can happen. Buckle up.